|
Secondly, there was a great deal of interest to pursue and if we wanted to buy land, we basically had to do it through a third party and that was the Lands Department, to get a valuation. So your process was: write to Lands Department, say you have had an offer, this is it, could you please provide a valuation, OK. In one case, we tried to buy a block up up at Springbrook. We had an offer and it must have been two years later the Lands Department did the valuation. The valuation was what we had offered, but they valued it on the last sale and the fellow had sold it to someone else. So that was the sort of bureaucracy and inertia that existed.
So the bureaucratic procedures just often stopped the opportunity being grasped?
Yes. And as for a last resort to resume land for a National Park – don't even consider it. So, there were these niggling interests about different blocks and the value was only for some of the blocks, maybe $3,000.00 or something, in 1970's dollars.
But a house in a town at that time was about $30,000.00 or $20,000.00 or something like that?
Yes. There were these niggles about interests and a fellow came down here once and Paula was with me. We were sitting up there talking about this and Paula made the observation that we should buy the lot. Don't want holes all over the place. And that was the first time it had been mooted that we should approach this holistically. It was a bit pie in the sky really.
Then in 1974, the Forestry Department in Brisbane, a fellow called Mike Harris had just graduated as a forester and for some reason, Sid Curtis who was overseeing all the National Parks, said "We've got a young forester working for us". First he'd heard of it. Sid said "Find him something to do, there's plenty of work to do." I suggested to Mike to come down here and look at all of these parcels of land. Just do a summary on each, what they were like, who owns them, what their tenures were, whether they were disturbed and to put them all in one report, bring all the proposals into one. Mike did that. It was his first job in National Parks and it was the sort of job that, because he didn't have anything else to do, he could go and do it and finish. Most of us were given so many jobs we never finished anything. He was the new one and he did it. So he had a bound report and then, fortuitously in 1975, the National Parks and Wildlife was set up which brought DPI, Fauna Conservation, National Parks and Forestry together with Saunders as Director.
As part of the restructure, we had an acquisitions section set up. There were a lot of potential acquisitions in the tunnel. A lot of the work coming out of Peter Stanton – Cape York and all of that with Joh promising to make them all National Parks, which was probably cynically motivated to stop the Aboriginals from claiming them.
So they set up this acquisitions section that had Ken Green from Lands, the Lands Commissioner and the valuer, and they gave him a clerk, John Churchward. John was from the Lands Department. John had worked on the Brigalow Scheme, subdividing the brigalow. He tells a story that in their office they had a potted brigalow and they had hung a sign on it, "The Enemy".
So you had this set up, the report, and a new Director, Reading. You had Ken Tompkins, the Minister, and there was a bit of political support too, I suppose from Joh. John Churchward picked up this report and he really drove it. John was very religious, in fact he left National Parks to become a preacher or something. My joke is he had a conversion on the way to Girraween. So, no longer was he into cutting up brigalow. He picked up all these proposals here and he pretty well kept nagging, worrying, coming down, talking to these people, just kept it up. Because it was all there in this report, this is my reading of it, that there was some Director who could say, "Minister, here's something we've got as an opportunity". That is my reading of how it was driven and of course, as we were acquiring block by block, the values were going up and going up and at the end, we ended up doing two or three resumptions. There was Knealings, Ward and Sound, Saunders and the mining homestead lease. The Crown couldn't resume them for some reason, but anyway, there was some pressure there. It was really John and the other player in the scene could have been Jean Harslett. She's a local, lived in Stanthorpe, vegetable grower, but also into wildlife and nature.
While all this was going on, Graham Saunders, the Director, was having a lot to say. We had meetings down here in 1976/77. Graham, if he was swanning someone, if things got a little contentious, or political, he would probably back off. I just wonder whether Jean Harslett was putting a bit of steel in his back at the same time to keep things on the go, to resist the local flak that might have come from any of the acquisitions and resumptions.
To have the vision, then to see it progress to being documented and then to actually happening …
You sit up on the pyramid there and you look around and say "Why not?" Ideally, the whole valley should be park, even just from a management point of view. There was one block here, Howard's, that the agreement to purchase had already been signed. Howard's sawmill, and after the agreement was signed, he started logging and John Churchward said, "Apparently he's logging. Tell him we're still interested in it." John asked where I had heard about the logging and I told him he didn't want to know. I suggested that we just keep going ahead and not raise the issue, because it would have been raised and we would have ended up fighting and the whole thing could have fallen over. The way I figured it, it was better off having the land logged because we were taking so much disturbed country anyway and look at it now. The real persistence came from John Churchward. He was like a terrier, he just kept coming down here.
How long a period did that take?
When was the last acquisition? It must have been about 1980.
Probably from go to whoa was about six or seven years?
Particularly the last few. What was happening at that same time, some city people, the "drop outs", were looking for places to drop into. The other interesting parallel story to that is looking at the other side of the border, "The tale of two parks". Originally, Bald Rock was just a scenic reserve – the rock itself and a lookout. Then, John Somerlad was the local ranger. He just kept driving that acquisition through, but that was happening completely independently of what was happening on this side. But when you look at the map now, at what the combined parks are, you've got basically from here to the border to the old Mt Lindesay Highway as national park. Not far beyond that you've got Boonoo Boonoo Falls and acquisitions have made that bigger than it was originally and Basket Swamp State Forest runs right through to Sandy Hills. It's a big patch of pretty wild country in this area. In Queensland, our thinking used to stop at the border of NSW but at the same time, this acquisition stuff was being driven by John Somerlad on the other side of the border. It would be worth getting his story. He's in Tenterfield.
It would be an interesting complement, certainly from a conservation point of view.
If we tried to do it today, you'd be fighting vineyards. History tells us that things happened because the time was right and circumstances just fell into place. And that's sort of what happened here. It's hard to say "that was the reason" and "that was the reason" and "that was the idea". It all just fell together and it happened. Also there was the acquisition of Sundown. That happened at the same time.
When you look at the original number of parcels, you think how big a vision it was to put all that together and a big job to make it happen. When it does come together though, there is such value.
In a sense it's what Dick Clarkson did in the Central Highlands - Carnarvon, Mount Moffat, Dooloogra, right around to Salvator Rosa. Dick was the guy who first saw that as one big concept and he kept nudging that along too. Dick's never had any recognition for doing anything like that. He's one of the most unrecognised people in the Department. He's his own worst enemy, too.
He's actually a lovely bloke I reckon.
Yes, very intelligent. Unfortunately, he can sometimes turn his intelligence into criticism.
Now that you see, 40 years on, is it a big sense of satisfaction with all that has happened?
I don't know. I've got a lot of mixed feelings about working for National Parks. Managerially, it was a terrible place. I had a lot of nasty things going on.
In the park itself, how have you seen the landscape change over the last 40 years?
The most obvious way was when I first came here you could look across and see just bare paddock. I haven't been here since about 1980, so I haven't seen what's grown back. I don't know what it's like.
One of the things we have really hammered in over the last two or three years is that we will have …… totally under control at Girraween within probably another year. We've probably spent $30, 000.00 to $35, 000.00 just on that operation this year, so probably $50, 000.00 including our labour.
You can start to see it all fill in.
It gives it proof to the vision to just "get the land" because time will sort it out.
If the service hadn't been set up, the whole thing would have just fallen through the floor and we would still be arguing about it today.
As you say, the power of an idea whose time had come at the right time.
It was just fortuitous that Mike Harris had done the stuff, put it all together with a photo on the cover and said, "This is Girraween" and John used to walk around and say how it was vital. Conversion on the road to Girraween!
A lot of power in actually having done that work?
Yes, but then John was only a Class One Clerk. But he had this determination. He used to talk about subdividing the brigalow country and a lot of passion was involved in that work. He kept coming down, I think he just bored some of them into selling so that it would keep him away.
I guess that persistence means that when the thinking says they might sell, he's the first person they're going to think of because he's been there, been there, been there, so when they finally think, "I wouldn't mind selling" …
The prices were going up, too, and I suspect because people were running cattle it wasn't all that great shakes anyway. They were better off selling, as at that stage, they wouldn't have found another buyer anyway. It's a different story now. If you look over at Boonoo Boonoo, land values have probably doubled.
Even in the time I've been here, they've gone up 60% to 70%, that's been since 2002. Once the park was established, did you have a lot to do with the planning and the laying out of the park's facilities and the recreational planning for the nodes and so on?
Pretty well, I suppose. A lot of things were pretty obvious with respect to what had to be done. Like the information centre, water supply (that was a partly-funded grant from National Estate, the Whitlam Government, I did that proposal). I briefed architects to build this and the Carnarvon information centre, Kinaba – I've got a story about Kinaba too. When I was in Forestry, I was co-ordinating all the works programs in parks across the state, worked out annual budgets, which projects were going to get funded that year and in Southern Queensland, it was hands-on experience working for the overseers.
|
